Kenya's Safaricom has embarked on a major overhaul of its M-Pesa mobile money platform which will dramatically increase processing capacity, enabling near real-time payments.
According to Business Daily Africa, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has been chosen to handle the 18 month project, the first phase of which is slated to be completed in the fourth quarter.
As part of the revamp, M-Pesa servers will be relocated to Kenya from Germany, a move designed to improve reliability for customers and slash costs for the company.
Business Daily Africa says that it currently takes 48 hours for M-Pesa payments made to Kenya Power to be completed, while for the National Hospital Insurance Fund the wait is 76 hours.
These times will be slashed by the new platform, which will process 10 times as many transactions a second as the current 200 to 300 capacity.
In addition, the overhaul is also designed to help M-Pesa move into new areas, including point-of-sale payments, letting shoppers pay for goods instantly at ther till using their handsets. Pension and salary payments to people in rural areas are also on Safaricom's radar.
Separately, M-Pesa will not now be making its way to Myanmar. Vodafone had planned to bring the service to South East Asia if it won a bid to operate a mobile network in the country.
However, having secured a place on a government short-list of 12 contenders for licenses, Vodafone and its partner China Mobile have withdrawn from the process after seeing the conditions.